I rolled credits on Big Walk on Monday. It was astonishing. I'm really excited to get into the post-game challenges, and I'm also eager to play the whole thing again with different groups of people! (Let me know if you want to play!)
On Saturday I started something I was putting off because I was scared of it: sculpting the faces for the characters in my show out of modeling clay. It ended up being a really quick and pleasant experience:
These were covered in plastic wrap and then paper mache shortly after sculpting, so they didn't need to be very detailed. I was able to focus on the big forms and features and think more about the contrast between each one. This clay doesn't dry, so after the paper mache was solid I could pull it all out and throw it back in the tub for next time.
I loved this process! It was faster and more fun than doing the same thing using my Blender-to-papercraft technique. I think I'm starting to see how these techniques fit together: papercraft for the largest, broadest forms; modeling clay molds for one-off pieces with moderate detail; air-dry clay applied directly to paper clay for the finest details. (Not sure these characters will need that last step.)
I spent a couple days laying paper mache over these, making some crude paper clay out of mashed-up brown paper bags mixed with wood glue and joint compound, applying that clay to the inside of the faces to give them some strength and thickness, filling the rest of the void with paper, attaching them to the previously-formed head backs with masking tape; then covering over everything with one more monolithic layer of paper mache. I didn't really take any photos of these intermediate steps. I generally left the pieces on a table outside so they could dry in the sun, but I had one unexpected final step on the heads to repair some damage from raccoons that found the otherwise-finished pieces overnight:
Lucky the damage was minor and easy to fix. Imagine if one of them ran away with one of these pieces?
While I was making batches of wheatpaste I was also working on the toucan. No photos of that either because it's not visually interesting yet, but I separated the head from the body and reinforced both parts at the cuts. I added a wooden armature to the head that I could mount to servos and it turned out to be way too heavy, so I had to backtrack a bit. Here's a servo setup I was trying, using two push arms that would lift and tilt the head. You can also see the parts of the toucan in the background, actually:
It's very very janky, and in fact is too janky to be reliable, so I am starting over on the bird mechanism, probably using a simpler pan/tilt design. I'll also need to be careful about adding some weights to the bird head so that its center of mass is above the neck but also so the whole thing is not too heavy. (How do real toucans do this? Do they have amazing neck muscles?)
Everything is dry on the bandmates so I plugged all their parts together again and set them up for the first time!
Wow! Can't remember how much of this I've described before but the one on the left is strumming a washtub bass, the one on the lower-right is tooting a clarinet-like horn, and the top/centerish one is very self-important and tings a triangle intermittently. I'm pleased enough I think! Also, for scale reference, the green backdrop behind them is two feet wide by three feet tall. I've blocked them all out here with boxes and junk from around the garage. I'm not sure exactly what their ground is going to be. Rocks? Branches? Dunno! But I expect to keep them in roughly this composition, maybe spaced out a bit more. This very vertical arrangement was inspired by some of the later scenes in Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland; last time I rode it, I was shocked by how much elevation there is in some of the blocking.
I ought to space out the players a bit front-to-back as well to give them some parallax. These critters will be staged "within" the show, only just barely visible from the sidewalk, encouraging people to approach the house a bit and take a look at things from another angle.
I'm also still deciding how to decorate them. In my original sketches they have big bushy eyebrows that cover their eyes, which I'm excited to add. I might continue this and give them fur on their arms and legs, sort of evoking a fringed jacket? It'd do a lot to smooth out some of the rough transitions between the body parts.
Speaking of, a couple days ago I realized a much more effective way to construct this kind of character, using techniques I had considered and then disregarded from Jimmy Grimes's Puppet Mechanisms and how to make them. Next time…
For now, I think I want to see this band scene through and set aside the toucan because it is frustrating me. Painting and mounting the musicians would feel really great and be very fun to show off, so that's the focus for this week!